MMO with an integrated AI, but it never actually says anything, it just analyses the vocabulary and phrasing of player chatter and bans you if it detects OOC on public channels.
scrimblobingus27, your account has been temporarily banned for saying “actually i don’t think i’d be into pegging” in global chat. Our algorithm has deemed that your character Would Not Fucking Say That. You have 48 hours to submit 5-10 run-on sentences explaining why you believe the flagged statement is in-character given your preceding actions and experiences, otherwise your actions may result in further suspension.
Sigh. Another morning in America. I wonder what horrors happened there
“Hundreds of police cars showed up…”
Of course
“…when it’s rumored on TikTok a ten-foot tall shadow alien appeared inside the mall.”
It’s sad how this is so expe-
wait what?
“Police claim it was just teens fighting, but would they bring in that many police for kids fighting?”
Yeah man that’s the most American shit I’ve ever heard
“On TikTok they claim the second the alien appeared someone shot at it, and the police tried to arrest the alien”
Yeah man that’s also the most American shit I’ve ever heard
Looked into it & right away saw someone saying “The dark 8-10ft tall beings is not project blue beam. It is a real manifestation of the Nephilim” and there’s something about people so authoritatively debating something that doesn’t exist that crashes energy through my body, I am Awake now.
hey, if you like my comics, consider supporting on patreon. it goes a long way towards helping me produce comics. And there’s a bunch of options with cool rewards, like my new interactive comic series “bad dog”
just spent like an hour playing “who’s that pokemon” w my sibling and i was flabbergasted when they couldnt identify like half the pokemon they were seeing. (shrek voice) he didnt even know garganacl
the masses are uneducated . we must bring back the pokerap
when e.e. cummings said “i’ll live my life if it kills me”
when andrea gibson said “i suppose i love this life, in spite of my clenched fist.” & when ellen bass said “to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it”
You’re joking, but it actually is a popular theory in chess that a complete noob potentially can beat a master by confusing them - as the noob doesn’t know what they’re doing the master is unable to recognize which of valid strategies they’re pursuing and cannot deploy proper counterstrategy.
Chessmasters when their opponent doesn’t make one of the five approved optimal opening moves:
I’m currently a fencing coach for a high school club and my least disciplined fencer routinely beats kids who have been fencing for 5-6 years because he’s just so unpredictable and messy that his opponents have no idea what to do.
I know what a master is doing, I just may not be faster than them. I know I’m faster than a newbie but hey what the fuck is happening?
I have, on rare occasions, won pokemon battles like this. I have no idea what the meta is, and just slap things together that sound cool. It’s fun when you win by taking someone completely off guard because “Who would run that?!” Idk man, the noob that just kicked your ass. I’m not smart enough for all these mind games that go into serious competitive pokemon, but I do know big laser go pew.
The Newbie Flail™ is the most terrifying attack imaginable.
“The best swordsman on the planet doesn’t fear the second-best swordsman. He fears the new swordsman, because he has no idea what the lunatic will do.”
One of the main reasons fencing against a total beginner can be difficult is that they have no self-preservation. They either don’t know or don’t care to defend themselves the way someone with more experience does, and have no issue leaving themselves vulnerable to make attacks, which breaks down the usual tempo of a fight and puts you on the defensive (because you value your safety), and you don’t want to be on the defensive.
If I had a nickel every time I recieved fencing advise from a trans girl on tumblr with the term catgirl in her url I’d have two nickels! Which you know it’s not a lot but it’s funny it happened twice.
We have a long and treasured warrior history. Google “warrior cats” to find out more
An international group of qualified mushroom identifiers who do worldwide identification in emergency cases have identified the Shroomers App as a potentially very dangerous system that could kill you if you try to use it to identify edible mushrooms. They use AI to generate almost all of their content, including their identification profiles on their app as well as their books and other materials. Not only is this unethical from a content creation standpoint, it is also extremely dangerous.
DO NOT USE APPS FOR IDENTIFICATION PURPOSES BEYOND SIMPLE CURIOSITY. A MISTAKE WHEN IDENTIFYING AN EDIBLE COULD COST YOU YOUR LIFE. DO NOT EAT ANY FORAGED MUSHROOM YOU CANNOT IDENTIFY YOURSELF BY SIGHT OR HAS BEEN IDENTIFIED IN PERSON BY SOMEONE WHO CAN.
ONLY BUY BOOKS FROM REPUTABLE SOURCES AND AT THIS POINT THAT MEANS ASKING EXPERIENCED PEOPLE WHAT BOOKS THEY USE.
Mushrooms are fun, amazing organisms. Enjoy safely.
Y'know I’m not sure that those “I love the way men love” posts are really much different than someone admiring a goldfish struggling to survive even 5% of its expected lifetime in a tiny glass bowl.
Sounds like some juicy discourse. Elaborate.
I did a bit already in the notes but I guess I can probably find more to say than
We taught this thing that it’s not allowed to show emotion without punishment, so it has to tangle itself into subtle contradictions to give love and receive affection!
Basically I see a lot of these posts where some taciturn father or uncle or grandfather who never shares much with his family is revealed to be secretly listening to all of his daughter’s soccer games on the radio, or making sure his grandkids’ cars are functioning, or keeping some heirloom or love letters from a long-lost lover who died tragically before he married the woman he had kids with, or something like that.
And this is always presented as something endearing, but I think it’s actually rather upsetting! It’s a bit like those news stories about how, e.g. “This whole town pitched in to make sure this fifth-grader could afford the surgery he needed to live” where the real tragedy is that the problem existed in the first place. Children (and adults) should be able to access the medical care they need without a whole town coming together to pity them, and men should have ways to show the love that they have for others that doesn’t have to be discovered by whoever goes through their estate after the funeral.
I think this is a form of trauma, where men are “socialized” in a way that punishes them for showing genuine emotion, and so they learn not to do that, but they still feel those emotions and want to express them, and so they struggle to find an outlet for them that won’t result in them being ostracized or dehumanized by the very people that they feel those emotions for. Which results in doing things that no one else ever really notices unless they look very closely.
And I’m saying this all as someone on the outside looking in, I never felt personally felt this way growing up because I didn’t care about these punishments, who cares if people don’t see me as a man (I didn’t want them to) or if they think I’m a faggot (I am, after all…). But there’s no reason that showing emotion needs to be tied to either of these things, and it plainly looks like other people are suffering as a result, so we should figure out how to make this not be the case.
I feel somewhat obligated after venting this much to tie this up with some nice conclusion about what people should do about this, but unfortunately I don’t really have one. I think a lot of this sort of damage is hard to undo, and probably at a certain point it starts to be more self-inflicted. Maybe I just wish people would approach the matter with a little more gravity than “Isn’t this cute”? idk.
Every time I see that G–gle phone photoshop commercial my heart is filled with infinite sadness, like, yeah it’s cool you can have a good family photo, it’s cool you can do that, but god, there is something to be said for the honesty of a family photo where you’re blinking, or crying, or have ugly wrinkles.
What is too unsightly for you? Would you swipe-click-replace out the image of my cousin crying on our Florida trip family reunion photo? Would you remove the plastic snake I have clenched in my grip, which I still have to this day? Would you scoff at the wrinkles around our eyes and the strands of hair on our faces as we squint into the wind, the day before the massive storm? Would I remember it if I didn’t have these reminders, if the picture was perfect and clean, all children in a row with perfect gleaming white tombstone tooth smiles? No tears. No plastic snake.
i hate seeing people now making fun of those who care about privacy online. i’ve seen people saying things like “well they already have your data. what are companies going to do with it” and it’s like, that’s not the point. it’s that companies /shouldn’t/ be able to have my data and sell it. am i aware they probably already have my data? yes, absolutely. but i’m still going to try and keep them from monetizing it any further, why are we defending companies selling data they shouldn’t have to begin with though?
adding this to the post because, 100%, just there’s a fire doesn’t mean you should pour gasoline on it
I have like ten different ad and/or tracking blockers on my PC and phone… just out of pure spite
Is there any benefit to using multiple ad blockers at once? I honestly don’t know, but I haven’t seen a single ad on the internet in ages and I get to use this image:
(Non-authors, please RB to signal boost to your author friends!)
An astute reader informed me this morning that one of my fics (Children of the Future Age) had been pirated and was being sold as a novel on Amazon:
(And they weren’t even creative with their cover design. If you’re going to pirate something that I spent a full year of my life writing, at least give me a pretty screenshot to brag about later. Seriously.)
I promptly filed a DMCA complaint to have it removed, but I checked out the company that put it up – Plush Books – and it looks like A LOT of their books are pirated fic. They are by no means the only ones doing this, either – the fact that “”“publishers”“” can download stories from AO3 in ebook format and then reupload them to Amazon in just a few clicks makes fic piracy a common problem. There are a whole host of reasons why letting this continue is bad – including actual legal risk to fanfiction archives – but basically:
IF YOU ARE A FANFIC AUTHOR WITH LONG AND/OR POPULAR WORKS, PLEASE CHECK AMAZON TO SEE IF YOUR STORIES HAVE BEEN PIRATED.
You can search for your fics by title, or by text from the description (which is often just copied wholesale from AO3 as well). If you find that someone has stolen your work and is selling it as their own, you can lodge a DMCA complaint (Amazon.com/USA site; other countries have different systems). If you haven’t done this before, it’s easy! Here’s a tutorial:
HOW TO FILE A COPYRIGHT COMPLAINT FOR STOLEN WORK ON AMAZON.COM:
First, go to this form. You’ll need to be signed into your Amazon account.
Select the radio buttons/dropdown options (shown below) to indicate that you are the legal Rights Owner, you have a copyright concern, and it is about a pirated product.
Enter the name of your story in the Name of Brand field.
In the Link to the Copyrighted Work box, enter a link to the story on AO3 or whatever site your work is posted on.
In the Additional Information box, explain that you are the author of the work and it is being sold without your permission. That’s all you really need. If you want, you can include additional information that might be helpful in establishing the validity of your claim, but you don’t have to go into great detail. You can simply write something like this:
I am the author of this work, which is being sold by [publisher] without my permission. I originally published this story in [date/year] on [name of site], and have provided a link to the original above. On request, I can provide documentation proving that I am the owner of the account that originally posted this story.
In the ASIN/ISBN-10 field, copy and paste the ID number from the pirated copy’s URL. You’ll find this ten-digit number in the Amazon URL after the word “product,” as in the screenshot below. (If the URL extends beyond this number, you can ignore everything from the question mark on.) Once this number has been added, Amazon will pull the product information automatically and add it to the complaint form, so you can check the listing title and make sure it’s correct.
Finally, add your contact information to the relevant fields, check the “I have read and accept the statements” box, and then click Submit. You should receive an email confirmation that Amazon has received the form.
Please share this information with your writer friends, keep an eye out for/report pirated works, and help us keep fanfiction free and legally protected!
NOTE: All of the above also applies to Amazon products featuring stolen artwork, etc., so fan artists should check too!
UPDATE: Plush Books still exists on Amazon and on Goodreads under the pseudonym “J.D. Geraghty” where the fanfics are also listed. They also have a list of cookbooks that are without a doubt AI written (the descriptions for the books are repetitive nonsense so god forbid what exists inside).
From what I can see on Amazon, most of the stolen fanfics have become “Unavailable.” This entity likely operates under more than one name, so it isn’t safe to assume crisis averted. Numerous bad actors are posting AI written works to Amazon, which just means plagiarism slurry with a side of potential danger (like the autogenerated mushroom identification books).
oh ffs. shared.
oh fuck you, ‘JD Geraghty’. You did not write this. I DID.
SAG-AFTRA, the union representing thousands of performers, has struck a deal with an AI voice acting platform aimed at making it easier for actors to license their voice for use in video games. …
the agreements cover the creation of so-called “digital voice replicas” and how they can be used by game studios and other companies. The deal has provisions for minimum rates, safe storage and transparency requirements, as well as “limitations on the amount of time that a performance replica can be employed without further payment and consent.”
Notably, the agreement does not cover whether actors’ replicas can be used to train large language models (LLMs), though Replica Studios CEO Shreyas Nivas said the company was interested in pursuing such an arrangement. “We have been talking to so many of the large AAA studios about this use case,” Nivas said. He added that LLMs are “out-of-scope of this agreement” but “they will hopefully [be] things that we will continue to work on and partner on.”
…Even so, some well-known voice actors were immediately skeptical of the news, as the BBC reports. In a press release, SAG-AFTRA said the agreement had been approved by “affected members of the union’s voiceover performer community.” But on X, voice actors said they had not been given advance notice. “How has this agreement passed without notice or vote,” wrote Veronica Taylor, who voiced Ash in Pokémon. “Encouraging/allowing AI replacement is a slippery slope downward.” Roger Clark, who voiced Arthur Morgan in Red Dead Redemption 2, also suggested he was not notified about the deal. “If I can pay for permission to have an AI rendering of an ‘A-list’ voice actor’s performance for a fraction of their rate I have next to no incentive to employ 90% of the lesser known ‘working’ actors that make up the majority of the industry,” Clark wrote.
SAG-AFTRA’s deal with Replica only covers a sliver of the game industry. Separately, the union is also negotiating with several of the major game studios after authorizing a strike last fall. “I certainly hope that the video game companies will take this as an inspiration to help us move forward in that negotiation,” Crabtree said.
And here are some various reactions I’ve found about things people in/adjacent to this can do
And in OTHER AI games news, Valve is updating it’s TOS to allow AI generated content on steam so long as devs promise they have the rights to use it, which you can read more about on Aftermath in this article by Luke Plunkett
“Oh you had a plague? Come back to us when you had a World War, brand new unconventional weapons, and a new international order.”
I apologize.
insert that YOU chihuahua post where theyre being pinned down i cant for the life of me find it
This one?
Oh, Charles. The hubris. Honey. You had to know this was a possibility. Why would you tempt Apollo like that.
I love how we don’t even need Apollo to be captioned, it’s just “he’s holding a dodgeball and looks Greek statue, of COURSE it’s Apollo delivering the gift of prophecy unto unsuspecting tumblr users”
I Need you all to stop and watch this fucking video in its entirety. Even if you have seen clips of this scene, you need to watch the full thing. This is the most batshit thing ever put onto tv and it’s how the fucking season STARTS
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